Posts From June 2012

Blogger and Movement Maker Dorchen Leidholdt at a Press Conference Outside New York's City Hall on Tuesday, June 12, 2012.

By any standard, the movement to end violence against women weighs in as one of the most powerful and effective social justice movements in history. With its American roots in both the Nineteenth Century campaign for women’s suffrage (a little known fact is that one major goal was the passage of laws to enable women to divorce abusive husbands) and the Twentieth Century’s civil rights movement for racial equality, the movement to end gender violence has a formidable list of achievements: the construction of a national infrastructure of shelter and services for victims; an influential body of research and scholarship;  the transformation of our nation’s criminal, family, and immigration laws; the passage of international human rights and criminal treaties; and major inroads into public discourse and values.